Autonomous robots are robots which can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. Many kinds of robots are autonomous to some degree. Different robots can be autonomous in different ways. An autonomous coverage robot traverses a work surface without continuous human guidance to perform one or more tasks. In the field of home, office and/or consumer-oriented robotics, mobile robots that perform household functions such as vacuum cleaning, floor washing, patrolling, lawn cutting and other such tasks have been widely adopted.
Mobile robots for cleaning floors have been described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,883,201 to JONES et al. (“JONES”), which discloses an autonomous floor-cleaning robot that traverses a floor while removing debris using rotating brushes, vacuums, or other cleaning mechanisms. JONES further describes a robot having a generally round form factor supported by three wheels, which can rotate freely to maneuver around obstacles, inter alia.